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Followed by humans or robots?
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Introduction
Do you think from the purge moment of Facebook that social media and business
leaders are finally starting to understand the importance of real relationships with fans?
Companies, organisations and brands are still willing to risk their reputation, (financial)
value, integrity, ethics, trust, clients and relationships for a few hundred or thousands of questionablefansonFacebook.
As a company, organisation or brand you are part of the entire internet ecosystem.
Even more so when you wish to have a better chance of being embraced by the end
user or the (future) fan or client. In addition, as a company, organisation or brand you
must realise that you exist thanks to content (intellectual property) and that you offer
functionality and that you are data.
Building a community takes time and investment. Purchasing fans is short sided when
you understand social media. By the way, for those who do not know, it is in directviolation, for example with Facebook terms and conditions. These questionable
accounts could be defined as questionable data which also depreciates the financial
value of a company. Further to using Facebook Ads when you are not injecting your
cash in the right places you will be wasting money. This means in terms of metrics and
demographical targeting you are trying to reach questionablefans.
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This paper helps to identify if a specific Facebook fanpage has a human following and
to help you to understand that you will depreciate the financial value of your company
and dont waste the Facebook Ad spend when working with questionablefans.
Based on and inspired by the three ways which Pam Moore of Social Media Today
described questionable fans, Belgian festival brand Tomorrowland, a festival that has
only taken place in Belgium so far, has been examined.
Gamechange
In the past decades, marketers overestimated the value of entirely measurable factors
with regards to emotional factors. This resulted in the marketer losing the emotional
connection with their fan or client. A company, organisation or brand that does not
create a positive connection with its clients becomes exchangeable for any other
company, organisation or brand that does.
The comprehensive internet landscape has changed and the rules of the game
changed in accordance. Fans and clients would rather listen to each other than to the
communication messages from companies, organisations or brands. A logical
consequence, because whom should you listen to with such a wealth of choice for
providers where the products and services are barely distinguishable. Fans and clients
integrate the new rules into their daily lives while companies, organisations or brands
still stubbornly steer clear from it. It is clear that the fan or client has become more
assertive and powerful.
Nowadays fans and clients will need a Likeable company, organisation or brand. Fans and clients wish to be seen and heard. Dialogue is the key word and connection is the
key. The fan, the client wants to be treated as a human again. Establishing an actual
connectionandspeakingortalkingwiththefanorclientiswhatitisabout.
Inventory, hardware, stock and debtors. These are less and less important in the
valuation of a company. The approach and the behaviour of banks, valuators and
investors endorse this. But what does increase the value of your company? While
historical value will not continue to play the biggest role in determining the value, data
primarily will concern future cash flow.
By making advanced and careful use of the own domain (.com for example) and social
media networks, new and digital marketing profiles can be created from data gathered.
So it can be determined that the value of companies, organisations or brands which
carefully organize and ensure the capture of data increases.
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Facebook
When a user looks at his news feed in Facebook, he does not see a chronological order
of all posts from his friends and pages he is following. Facebook filters and sorts the
posts to match the interest of each user. That is why we see some friends all the time
and others never appear in the news feed. Which posts are shown to the user depends
on his or her interaction with the administrator or the author of the post.
Only fan pages with good fan interaction are shown frequently in the news feed. If
Facebook recognizes that the posts of a fan page never trigger any interaction with
l ikes, comments and shares it concludes that the page is not very interesting. And
Facebook will show the posts less and less.
Facebook has an incredible reach. Across the globe there are more than 1 billion active
users and a majority of these people log in several times per day and spend a lot of
time on the network. He or she likes different pages, has different interests and is partof a network of friends, all of which is vital information when you plan to advertise on
this social network.
This information allows you to target exactly the right people and advertise the product
or service to the right demographics. The best Facebook ads always have a well
thought-out plan starting with the design of the ad, via which demographics to
approach, to the best way to analyze and take care of the traffic once people start
clicking through on the ad.
However, the massive reach isnt what makes Facebook a unique advertising platform,its rather the opportunity to approach exactly the people you want your target group,
your audience.
Creatingvalue
Name, address, town/city of residence, telephone number and e-mail. Can these
people be reached and will they allow this via the same social media? If a
comprehensive profile can be gathered from the connection via social media, this will
result in a standard value. So how to define new form of valuation?
Creating value with content (intellectual property) by using internet and social media
concerns being able to, in the basis, establishing, distributing, maintaining and
optimising current and new digital relations on the various internet platforms where
(in)directly and in a demonstrable way additional and future net cash flows can be
generated(ed.TheVoiceAsupplementaryearningmodel(DenisDoeland/PimvanBerkel)
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The words establishing, distributing, maintaining and optimising refer to the costs of
work and means. In addition it concerns the digital relations on multiple platforms.
Digital is a key element with this, in view of the fact that this makes it clear that it does
not concern a whole stack of addresses or other traditional marketing activities.
The rise of social media gives companies, organisations and brands such as a festival
brand an extra possibility to reach and follow their current and future fans. A direct
relationship can be made, which was not the case with traditional off-line marketing.
The step which companies, organisations and brands must make is to collect and
analyse the data to subsequently implement a fol low-up strategy or entirely new
(marketing) strategy, with the objective of increasing future revenue.
Questionablefans=questionabledata=questionablevalue
In March 2012 Facebook claimed about 5% to 6% of its accounts or 40.3 million to
50.7 million were questionable. The company also stated that it bans at least20,000 accounts daily and estimates about 600,000 accounts per day are
compromised.
The number of questionable accounts on Facebook is roughly the size of Egypt's
population and larger than most of the world's countries, the company disclosed at the
time. Facebook finally acknowledged a total of 8.7% or 83 million accounts on
the network were questionable. Of that 8.7%, 4.8% are duplicate accounts, 2.4% are
user-misclassified accounts and 1.5% are undesirable accounts or so-called spam.
These accounts could be defined as questionable data which depreciates the value of a company. In September 2012 Facebook began a purge of so-called fake accounts
and fake Likes as part of a set of site improvements announced a month earlier. The
program was called Operation Unlike by many bloggers. The result was lower
numbers on fan pages, including some of the site's most popular ones, but no actual
loss of real followers for Facebook.
CaseStudy
How do you determine a Facebook page has questionable fans? While not quite as
simple, but when you put multiple data elements together you are able to create a
clear picture on the authenticity of a proclaimed community. To get a better
understanding we looked into the data of the Belgian festival Tomorrowland.
1.)Verifysourcecity,locationandageoffans
With this step you are checking if it is possible the brands Facebook likes are coming
from a foreign country for which the brand has purchased fans. The purchase of fans
can be done via paid services through agencies who offer such services.
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Click on the number of likes on the page via the big box underneath the Facebook
page cover photo. You may need to click the arrow to show the box if the brand ordered
the number of likes to be shown lower in the list.
Assess the results. Next you will then see the above figure of Tomorrowland which
highlights the following information:
Most popular week.
Most popular city.
Most popular age group.
Is the popular city a city the brand does business in? Or is it a far-off country? Does the
brand do its business in that country? Does the brand have a large following in that
country? Or is it a foreign country which the brand does not do business in and does
not have a valid following from that country? What is the most popular age of the fans?
Are they 18-24 yr olds? Are they 35-44 years of age or older? Or a different age
category? Does the age match the brands target demographic?
Does it make sense that this age group would be so engaged with their content and
services? Red flags show when the answers are positive to these questions. See the
country graph of Tomorrowland below.
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2.)HowmanypeoplearetalkingaboutthebrandonFacebook?
When a brand has 35,000 fans/likes but only 50 are talking about the brand, a red flag
will appear. Are they posting content daily? If yes, either a.) they are not effective at
engagingtheirfansorb.)theirfansarenotrealsotheycantengage.
Number of Fans/Likes and the Average Engagement Rate (AER) according to
Socialbakers.
0 -10k (AER: 0.96 %) 10k 20k (AER: 0.29 %)
20k 50k (AER: 0.21 %)
50k 100k (AER: 0.19 %)
100k 200k (AER: 0.16 %)
200k 500k (AER: 0.13 %)
500k 1000k (AER: 0.11 %)
1000k - (AER: ~ 0.09 %)
These averages are based on analytics from over 9,000 active Facebook pages
monitored. This average is of a significant weight.
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In the case of Tomorrowland, 56,822 fans out of over 3.2 million fans talked about the
brand on 10th April which is about 1.8% of the community. When you examine the
graph above it seems as if Tomorrowland is outperforming the above Average
Engagement Rates examined by Socialbakers.
3.)Whoislikingthedailypostsandcontent?
How many likes are those posts getting? Is there an equal distribution of likes? Or are
there tons of likes on one day and zero engagement on other posts. It could be the
posts were more engaging or the brand just rocked the Facebook Edge Rank that day.
However, you should be able to see any trend.
When you click on a number of l ikes under any post that seems to have a substantial
number of likes, it will take you to a page where you can see the profiles of the l ikes.
Are they real accounts? Or are they robots? Do they appear to be from a same foreign
country for which their most popular city is in the Facebook insights? It appears thatTomorrowland has complied with all of the above. Another red flag shows up.
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4.)Whendidthebrandsfansbecomefans?
On most fanpages you see the monthly activity within the timeline. Did the brand jump
from 1,000 fans to 20,000 fans in one month? If yes, the brand may have had a very
successful campaign, became an overnight success online and offline. This is
possible. However, when data analysis above shows red flags and the brands
Facebook page shows an unrealistic jump in any given single month, the chances of
whether these are questionable accounts just increased.
Overview
To understand better the results based on the signals of Pam Moore a sanity check has
been conducted. A sanity check is a basic test to evaluate whether a claim or a result
of a research can possibly be true. It is a simple check to see if the produced material
is rational. The point of a sanity test is to rule out certain classes of obviously false
results, not to catch every possible error.
The columns in the table below show Red Flag and Sanity Check. When Y is noticed
in the Red Flag column it means that this is in accordance with the signal of Pam Moore, when Y is noticed in the Sanity Check column it means that the outcome is in
accordance with the expectation of what is rational or this could be true.
When you look at 9 of the signals defined in the 4 paragraphs above by Pam Moore the
following table for Tomorrowland will appear.
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SignalsdefinedbyPamMoore Redflag Sanitycheck
Fans from far away countries1 Y Y
Most fans are not from the country of origin1 Y Y
Specific popular age group1
Y N
No demographic match1 Y N
Engagement rate2 Y N
People talking about is an equal average2 Y Y
Same people which like the posts3 Y N
Equality in distribution of likes3 Y N
Jump in fan growth4 Y Y
No engagement f rom the administrator5 Y Y
Advice
It is time for some advice about community management and how to retain company
value. Community managers normally are great listeners, constantly in tune with what
people are saying and where they're saying it online. But what good is that feedback if
it's not being turned into action? Establish a system to inform the stakeholders who are
making your products, content or whatever you create.
While understanding your fans is the first rule of community management,understanding the specific platform you use to communicate is second. Know what
communities exist on each of your platforms and what type of communication works
best for them. Track how fans are responding to your brand in terms of likes, retweets,
sentiment analysis or whatever makes most sense for your brands business. Use this
data to help make decisions about how you want to interact with your community.
The beauty of social networking is that it gives everyone a voice. This means your
community members are constantly bombed with updates from not only brands but
also friends, family, celebrities, schools and more. Offer your community valuable and
a variety of updates and content.
Something that might pop up as a trend in a timeline could be non-existent to others.
Speak to your community as humans, but don't be condescending. Consider the way
you feel about the brands you follow and how they to speak to you.
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Summary
Have you ever looked at a Facebook page of a company, organisation or brand which
recently augmented really quickly? You checked out their Facebook page and found
that they gained thousands of fans in a short amount of time.
At first you may think to yourself this brand must really know how to play the social
media game and build a community. However, when you double check you will see
that the engagement of the brand (5 see table above). itself is non-existent, even when the
brand has thousands or millions of fans. You checked on some of the likes the brand
received on recent posts and its obvious they are from a country foreign to the brand.
Its likely to determine these likes are robots.
The case study has not been conducted to judge the way Tomorrowland operates its
social media strategy or to judge if Tomorrowland is cheating or not. But this study
provides some lessons from which you might benefit when you operate your socialmedia strategy and build your company value.
Accuracymeansbetterunderstandingandrealvalue
Lower but more accurate Like counts actually help a brands Facebook page.
Administrators might not be able to tout the brands Facebook pages size the same
way, but theyll be better able to assess what content is resonating with their
audiences.
If a brands Facebook page has 10,000 fans but 4,000 are questionable and the
administrator publishes an update that got 2,500 Likes, the administrator might thinkonly a quarter of the fans are interested in that content. But with an accurate fan count
of 6,000, the administrator would know nearly half the fans enjoyed the specific post
and that they should post more with a similar vibe.
Meanwhile, on the user side of things, purging of questionable accounts means fewer
spam friend requests and comments, and a reduced risk of being scammed. Investors
will also get a better idea of your real financial value of your data because numbers
would not be inflated by questionable accounts. For sure it is good to conduct a due
diligence on your brands Facebook page numbers once in a while when the
aforementioned red flags show up.
Investinrealfans
The best and only way to see success in social media is by investing in real fans.
Invest in real people, real relationships, not in robots. At the end of the day those are
the fans you develop your products and services for. They are a companys or brands
real assets, the business model and the financial value.
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4 aspects to take into consideration while managing your community:
Consider the way you feel about the brands you follow and how they to speak to
you.
Offeryourcommunityvaluableandavarietyofupdates.
Establish a system to inform the stakeholders that are making your products,
contentorwhateveryoucreate.
Use data to help make decisions about how you want to interact with your
communityandbuildyourcompanyvalue.
Since Facebook users fill in a lot of information about themselves starting with basic
information such as where they live, their gender and their age etc. an advertiser can
be quite specific when deciding who to buy Facebook Ads for. For advertising on
Facebook questionable data means wasting money on demographics which are
corrupt.
Building a community takes time and investment. Listening to, participating in and
anticipating on the data which is created in so-called conversations and interactions
is what its all about. The generated data must be stored, analysed and related to the
data which you (possibly) already have. Keep in mind questionable accounts will be
defined as questionabledata.
Purchasing questionable fans is short sided when you understand social media. By
the way, for those who do not know, it is in direct violation with Facebook terms and
conditions. And finally, not to forget it is also a waste of money. At the end of the dayFacebook will purge these bought robots and your community will devaluate in the
broadest sense of the word. So your brand will be depreciated financially and will lose
in fan trust...
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AboutDDMCA
DDMCA assists brands, companies and organisations to apply internet and social business to meet the new expectations of fans,
clients, staff members and other involved parties. DDMCA helps give their voice a place in business and in the internal
organisation.
In the combination of development of knowledge, sharing of knowledge and consultancy in the ar ea of deployment of internet
from the organisation and social business sees DDMCA taking its place as a leader in its field. DDMCA offers its services in the
formof,amongotherthings,consultancy,analysis,lectures,valuation,training,socialmediamonitoringandinternetmonitoring.
DDMCA is specialised in internet and technology strategy, execution of a strategy and determination of the value of data. Clients
of DDMCA are both major organisations as well as smaller ones who are aware that communication and conversation will continue
to play an even greater role in and outside the organisation. DDMCA clients include Marlies Dekkers, 22tracks, JoinFeedBack,
Dance Therapy, Armada Music, Extended Music, Eurosport, B2S, 2-Dutch Agency, 8ballMusic, Whoopaa, HRMatches, Werk en
IK,MuziekCentrumNederland,Herome,AmsterdamDanceEvent,OgerandJunkieXL.
Note|Disclaimer|Copyright
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revenue,business,contracts,commercialopportunitiesorgoodwill.
This article is issued under Dutch copyright law and may not be r eproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or
broadcast without the prior written permission of DDMCA the owner of the issued content. You may not alter or remove any
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Need a strategy, an execution plan, a financial valuation report or need a n assessment? Please do not hesitate to contact. An
offer for a strategy, an execution plan or a full complete valuation report provided with a fairness opinion of a register valuator can
Contact
DDMCA-Attn.DenisDoeland-Mobile:+31613520250-Mail: [email protected]
Sources
Paper: The Internet Ecosystem (Denis Doeland)
Paper: The Voice: an additional earning model? (Denis Doeland/Pim van Berkel)
Paper: The Valuation of Data: Whats the financial value of an European Football Club (Denis Doeland/Pim van Berkel)
Pam Moore:
http://www.pammarketingnut.com/2013/03/how-to-determine-if-a-facebook-business-page-has-fake-fans/
Socialbakers: http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/114-what-is-a-good-engagement-rate-on-a-facebook-page
Mashable: http://mashable.com/2012/08/02/fake-facebook-accounts/
Techcrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/26/facebook-fake-accounts/
Frankwatching:
http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2013/03/13/tomorrowland-hoe-engage-je-3-miljoen-facebookfans/
Mashable: http://mashable.com/2013/01/28/community-management/
Qwaya: Advertising on Facebook
Data
Social Brand Builder
Fanpage Karma
Rankingz
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